Hi there, new to the board, having some fairly major difficulties with my girlfriends 1992 3.1TD Jap import Bighorn. It's one of those cool Lotus spec ones which drives like a racecar
Anyway, she's owned it for about 18 months and already spend $3000 NZD on repairs/servicing. Not long after she bought it, after driving up a big hill she noticed the engine seemed to make a nasty whinging noise at higher revs. She drove it to a mechanic who originally diagnosed it as a turbo fault, then thought it was poorly tensioned belts, so adjusted them and fixed an oil leak.
Not long after it started making the noise again but this time was very noisy and the engine was not under heavy load. She took it to her local mechanic who then diagnosed it as the auxillary belts pulley on the crank, he thought the bolt was shot, and replaced it - he decided to do the timing belt too as there was no record of it being done in recent history. Then after driivng it home a few weeks later it happened again when reversing a fairly weighty trailer up a steep driveway. The noise was pretty bad and didn't know if it was the t-belt on it's way out so we had it towed to her mechanic, he admitted that he replaced it with a second hand bolt and then charged her again to replace it with a new bolt. A few months later it started again.. The noise was obvious but not unbearable. Sick of dealing with it she put it to the back of her mind and eventually it went, big time.
I had to go out and rescue her as she lost power steering etc. I saw all the belts were off but not snapped.. Urgh. The timing belt light was on but the engine ran fine. We were close to town so drove carefully it into another mechanic whilst watching the temp guage closely! He found the very broken pulley at the bottom of the engine bay.. So before this gets fixed again, I want to know if it's possible/probable that the end of the crank is out of line/bent which is what throwing the pulley out. I thought it was most likely the mechanic not correctly torquing the pulley bolt up but find it hard to believe that two mechanics (the one before she owned it and the other guys) have got it wrong. Obviously it's going to be expensive to fix, don't want the same issues to arrise. Otherwise... Rebuild? Engine transplant? Or just do what we want to do which is strip it for parts?